Why was the GNU General Public License (GPL) with the “Classpath” Exception chosen?
The Open Wonderland Foundation wants community members and commercial vendors to share any improvements and/or bug fixes they make to the Open Wonderland code base itself. The GPL v2 license supports this objective. Open Wonderland includes a well-defined “module” system. Third-parties may develop modules for Open Wonderland that incorporate custom world designs and extensions to Open Wonderland using its APIs. We want everyone, both non-commercial community members and commercial vendors, to be able to build and redistribute these proprietary world designs and extensions to Open Wonderland as they see fit. The addition of the “Classpath” exception to the GPL v2 license allows developers to license their independently developed modules that are not derivatives of and do not contain portions of Open Wonderland code as they see fit under license terms other than GPLv2. Modules need not be licensed under the GPL v2 license terms, unless they are derivatives of or contain portions of Open
